Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work!

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <Pine.BSF.4.21.0104081508050.8921-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>, Brian
Rogoff says...
>
>On Sat, 7 Apr 2001, Larry Hazel wrote:
>> I personally think {} should be removed from the character set, or at least
>> require a minimum of 5 keystrokes to get either. 
>
>Well, personally I think this opinion is crap. Any reasons behind your

Whose, yours or Larrys? :-)  One of my personal favorite quotes: "Opinions are
like a**holes...everybody's got one, and they all stink."

>opinion? We were discussing making a language popular, and Bob Duff
>espoused the theory that C influenced syntax is popular, and that a new 
>language might seek to emulate it. I don't find {} vs begin end to be 
>terribly important, and not a reason that I like Ada over C and C++. 

There is absolutely no evidence that language popularity has anything to do with
syntax. That being the case, you'd like to strive for readability, not tersenes.
Curly-braces look quite a bit like parens at first glance (and sometimes upon
further glances too, depending on the font). Being a single chararacter, they
are fairly easy to miss with the eye, and are harder for the eye to properly
line up with distant lines (thus perhaps cause misapprehension of the proper
nesting level). In fact, the impression of pointing in a certian direction
causes a mild optical illusion which worsens the problem. Being mostly vertical,
they can also get accidentally hidden  behind the mouse pointer or an insertion
cursor.

>endlessly. Suffice to say that a slightly less verbose, more C like 
>surface syntax for an Ada like language isn't a bad idea IMO. 
If you want to favor the writer over the reader, perhaps. That is not The Ada
Way, though.

>> And keep () for array indices.  I have often used arrays as
>> approximations of complex functions in the early stages of development.  
>
>I've never done that, and besides () makes code so much less readable. If
I have. Its damn handy. I don't find it unreadable at all. It takes "information
hiding" one step further. An array is really just a prebuilt mapping function.
The main difference from the client perspective is that if its not a constant
array, you can modify the mappings on the fly with assignment syntax. But for
someone who just uses the mapping, why should they care how its implemented?

If I were looking to design my own language, what I'd look to do is extend this
analogy to somehow cover record objects as well.

>Anyways, this was a post-facto justification of this awful choice in Ada. 
>To be fair, it wasn't really a choice (of Ichbiah and co.) but a
>requirement to the languages competing. 
Are you sure? My understanding was that this was done *on purpose* for just this
reason.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com